Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that ghrelin, a naturally occurring gut hormone, increases our willingness to pay for food, while simultaneously decreasing our willingness to pay for non-food items.

In a study that increases the understanding of the link between fetal development and obesity later in life, researchers at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) found altering the levels of two common hormones, insulin and leptin, in utero changes the cellular development in the region of the brain that regulates appetite.

Women who have higher levels of the appetite-controlling hormone leptin have fewer symptoms of depression, and this apparent inverse relationship is not related to body mass index (BMI), a new study finds.